Peripatetic Pastor

Tag: Peripatetic Pastor

  • READING THE BIBLE . . . WRONG: BAD THEOLOGY 6

    The gospel reading this past Sunday was Luke 4:14-21. In the reading, Jesus has returned home. With “the power of the Spirit” resting on him (4:14), he must have seemed different. He has already been preaching in the villages round about Galilee, but now at last he is home in Nazareth. His fame (Greek phēmē)…

  • WHEN THE ORGAN GOES SILENT: BAD THEOLOGY 4

    WHEN THE ORGAN GOES SILENT I’m not sure when I first noticed that the organ had fallen silent. The synods of the Christian Reformed Church met for many years in the Calvin University Fine Arts Center Auditorium. (Lately, the synod has moved to the Calvin chapel building.) The auditorium features the impressive Zondervan Memorial Organ, built…

  • BAD THEOLOGY 3: THE THEOLOGY OF POWER

    BAD THEOLOGY, PART THREE I began this series of posts with a question: How has it happened that evangelical Christianity has so enthusiastically embraced Donald Trump. At first glance, this would not seem an alliance made in heaven—or anywhere else. In his book, The Violent Take It by Force (Fortress, 2024, Kindle Edition), a book I’ll come…

  • GO AND SEE: A CHRISTMAS MEDITATION

    The church we attend in Tucson, St. Philip’s in the Hills (don’t you love church names with directions in them), includes in its weekly worship schedule a choral evensong service. The short service, based on the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and almost entirely sung by one of St Philip’s choirs, attracts only a handful…

  • BAD THEOLOGY, PART TWO: AN APOCALYPTIC HABIT OF MIND

    In my last post—a short introduction to this series of blogs I’m calling Bad Theology—I asked why evangelical Christians seemed so susceptible to the blandishments of Donald Trump and his allies. Why in the face of his numerous lies, his business and personal failures, his many violations of basic Christian ethics, and his lack of any apparent allegiance…

  • BAD THEOLOGY

    Tim Alberta opens his bestselling book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism (HarperCollins 2023), by recounting a February 2021interview with Chris Winans, the pastor of Cornerstone Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Brighton, Michigan. At the time of the interview, it had not been going well for Winans. People were leaving…

  • THEOSIS: AN ADVENT MEDITATION

    Since all God’s divine power has been given to us, the power of life and godly living, through knowing the one who called us by [or “to”] his own glory and virtue [and] through which we have been given weighty and majestic promises that through these you may become participants in the nature of divinity,…

  • STRETCHING

    We are frequently told by “they”—anonymous experts cited in the popular media—that we should stretch before exercising. Good advice, I suspect, although in all my years of exercise I have never actually stretched. Still don’t. If it’s tennis, I grab a racquet and head for the court. If it’s a jog, I strap on my…

  • LIVING SMALL

    Sadness settled over many of us like a Bellingham fog. We were gathered with friends last Tuesday when the votes began to come in from the eastern part of the US. It quickly became apparent that disaster was in the making. We talked a while about what it meant, about why people voted the way…

  • SPIRITUAL ADULTHOOD

    I should have called a recent blog piece, “The Way of Doubt.” Instead, I called it, “The Quest for a Moral Center, Part 1”— a title simultaneously drab and misleading. The piece was not about finding a moral center but about doubt: how doubt often leads in the direction of renewed faith. Doubt, I suggested,…